Other Skills and Easy Activities That Accelerate Reading Readiness

The skills and concepts that need to be in place for a child to be able to read and decode are still a bit of a mystery. However, if your child becomes proficient in the following areas (and has the ability to feel and move to a steady beat) the groundwork will be laid for reading readiness.

The first building block is for your child to understanding what a symbol is. A symbol is something that represents an object or function. It’s pretty easy to point out symbols to your child. Examples include stop signs, railroad crossings, and the green, red or yellow lights on a traffic signal. Letters and numbers are also symbols, so help your child make connections to the letters and the sound each letter represents.

Second, your child must be able to cross the mid-line. The midline is the imaginary line between the right and left sides of your body. If a child is having trouble crossing the midline with her gross motor skills, then it will possibly be difficult for her to move her eyes from left to right (crossing the midline) when reading. Observe your child when playing. Is there difficulty or hesitation when having to cross the midline? For practice, you can do some of these fun exercises or games with your child to work on this.

Crossing the midline activities:

• Draw a large figure eight and then rotate the paper 90 degrees so that it looks like the “infinity” symbol. Have your child trace the sideways figure eight with a toy car and challenge him to use only one hand, so that he will cross the midline. This will also encourage your child to find his dominant hand. If your child stops and switches hands to complete the figure eight, then that would indicate that more practice is needed. (Of course, continued practice of crossing the midline is a good idea even if your child seems to have the hang of it.)
• Have your child throw a ball to himself from hand to hand.
• Put a colorful rubber band or hair band on one of your child’s wrists. Then instruct your child to bring one hand across the midline and touch the other hand, referring to the hand you want them to use as either “banded hand” or “unbanded hand. You can also call out “over” or “under,” so the child knows that the hand with the rubber band should be on the top or the bottom of the other hand.

A variation on this is to have one hand “tickle” the palm of the other hand and then vice versa. For example, if the left hand has the rubber band then start with it open on the left side of the body. Instruct your child to use the “unbanded hand” (right hand) to tickle the banded hand. The right hand would cross the midline, go on top of the left hand and tickle the palm.

The “Joppity Learns Steady Beat” video has activities that involve crossing the midline. Two sections in particular handle this quite well — “Joppity’s Jam” and “Silly Conducting.”

If your child is having trouble with this, put some painter’s tape or masking tape down the midpoint of your child’s shirt so he can get a greater sense of where the midline is.